When I refer to colony, I mean it quite literally: as a territory taken over by another power, where identity is maimed and slowly forgotten, values are shifted and the will for independence becomes ritualized into an increasingly empty and hopeless vow.
When I arrived in New York in 1964 I shared a studio with a painter who would not miss any opportunity to let me know that he considered printmaking a minor and second-rate form of art-making. Although we were close friends, the comments managed to upset me. I seriously considered myself a printmaker
and I didn‘t believe that there were major and minor forms of art-making. Educated in the Bauhaus spirit, fashionable in Uruguay during the fifties, I saw art as a seamless field. For me, therefore, there was art-making, period. I was essentially right and his reasoning was faulty–among other things for being a
painting-imperialist. But deep beneath his needling, there was a point. I was using a technical discipline to define myself and this was conceptually wrong. Somehow I had forgotten that I was supposed to be searching for myself and to be using printmaking as one of the tools in that search. Instead I was limit-
ing my own definition to and within printmaking. I lived the slogan: I make prints, therefore I am. And meanwhile, my friend was having a grand time exploring bad painting and chaos, breaking all the rules he could find. He had that kind of self-assurance that only is possible with metropolitan arrogance….
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The popular Salon caricatural-series “Nadar Jury”, which he created in collaboration with the history painter Alfred Darjou for Charles Philipon’s new cartoon magazine “Journal amusant”, reveals Nadar’s critical attachment to the contemporary art scene. In 1863 his enthusiasm for aerial photography got a setback when his giant balloon “Le Géant” crashed on a field near […]
Not translated: 5 LITHOGRAFIE OHNE DRUCK 9. Mai – 6. Juni 2014 SSG, Solnhofen Firma Friedel, Solnhofen „Die sensa sind nicht nur eine mehr oder weniger genaue, mehr oder weniger angenehme oder kohärente Form, uns über die äußere Umgebung zu belehren, oder ein Mittel, um darin handeln, existieren, das heißt manch- mal auch herrschen zu […]
Not translated: 3 ZU DEN STEINEN GEHEN 2. November 2013, Steinbruch Solnhofen „Travel and travelers are two things I loathe–and yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions. (…) Anthropology is a profession in which adventure plays no part; merely one of its bondages, it represents no more than a […]